A lesson paid for in innocent lives – and it's not over yet

Monday 4 May 2009 21.05 EDT
First published on Monday 4 May 2009 21.05 EDT

More than 30 years ago, a man who had recently been released from Pentonville prison came into the offices of Time Out magazine, where I then worked, and said we should cover a case that was about to start at the Old Bailey. The wrong people had been charged for a double murder, he said, and innocent people could be going to jail.

The trial of Reg Dudley and Bob Maynard for the murders of Billy Moseley and Micky Cornwall was, at the time, the longest trial in British legal history. The grisly nature of the crime – Moseley's body had been chopped up and dumped in the Thames – earned it the title of the Torso Murder case. But it was clear from the flimsy evidence presented – a prison informer, a supposedly incriminating remark to a police officer, disputed statements – that something very wrong was happening.

Despite the weakness of the prosecution, Dudley and Maynard were convicted and jailed for life in 1977. Three years later, I met for the first but not the last time the prison informer whose evidence helped convict them. He admitted he had made up his evidence to secure a shorter sentence for himself. At the time he was not prepared to go public about it but later, having become a born-again Christian, he finally did so in the Guardian in 1995. He was interviewed by the police and warned he could end up in prison again for perjury. So it was another seven years – after assurances that he would not be prosecuted – before he again owned up and the case went back to the court of appeal.

In 2002, Dudley and Maynard were finally cleared on that and other evidence. In the more than 20 years they spent in prison, there had been protests, petitions, documentaries, and many false dawns as the two sought their freedom. When they were eventually released, both were paid six-figure sums in compensation but neither could ever be repaid for the lost decades. Dudley died last year and Maynard attended his funeral in south London. The case was an object lesson in the way in which people can be convicted on the slimmest of evidence but also in how long it may take for a case to be reheard.

It was not long after that trial was over that doubts about a number of other high-profile cases began to emerge: the Birmingham six, the Guildford four, the Maguire seven, Judith Ward – the "Irish cases" as they became known. Their prosecutions came at a time when the United Kingdom was under attack from the IRA. People died in pub bombings and there was public anger in the air, much of it directed towards the Irish cotmmunity in Britain. The mood in much of the press was that the guilty people had to be found.

There was little sympathy for those convicted and, again, it took years before they were freed. The authorities were even aware that known IRA members had admitted responsibility for the bombs the Guildford four were convicted of planting. Nonetheless, the innocent three men and a woman were allowed to languish inside for 15 years before emerging triumphant, in what became a famous scene outside the Old Bailey.

The Irish cases had their own pattern – an atrocity, a public outcry and enormous pressure to convict, often on very flimsy evidence. But there were other cases gradually emerging which were just as disturbing. Stefan Kiszko, the Cardiff three, the Bridgewater four and many other cases which attracted attention, then drifted from view. Some of those wrongly convicted were victims of errors of the system or, in a few cases involving troubled souls, of their own false confessions.

Often the cases only came to light as the result of dogged work on the behalf of the innocent by diligent lawyers, urged on by family members. Often, too, their first appeals were rejected not least because to accept that they were not guilty would mean to accept that the police or the prosecution had behaved in appalling ways. This point of view was best summed up in the notorious ruling given by the late Lord Denning in 1980 when the Birmingham six sought to sue the West Midlands police who arrested and interrogated them. Denning saw that to allow the action meant accepting that the police framed innocent men. "'This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say: it cannot be right that these actions should go any further ... If the six men win, it will mean that the police were guilty of perjury, that they were guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were involuntary and were improperly admitted in evidence: and that the convictions were erroneous. That would mean that the home secretary would have either to recommend they be pardoned or he would have to remit the case to the court of appeal." The six spent 10 more years in jail before they were freed.

Part of the pattern was that many of those convicted had mental or emotional problems which often made them vulnerable to pressure from the police. Detectives may often have genuinely believed they had the right man and, if the suspect was suggestible, it was all too easy to persuade them to confess.

There have been big changes since those cases in the 70s. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 made it much harder for incriminating remarks to be attributed to people who had not made them. The emergence of the television programmes Rough Justice and Trial and Error meant journalists were able to pursue cases in detail and uncover miscarriages of justice. As Bob Woffinden noted in his introduction to his 1987 book, Miscarriages of Justice, the longer that dubious cases are left to languish, "the more complete will be the ultimate evaporation of public faith in the system".

There was a scepticism about some of the cases, a feeling expressed in some of the media that people had been released on "a technicality". Sometimes the police would say they were "not looking for anyone else" in connection with a crime, which was sometimes seen as a tacit suggestion that a guilty man had walked free. It was, perhaps, only when people started to be convicted for the crimes with which other people had been charged that there was a general acceptance that injustices had occurred.

In 2003, Jeffrey Gafoor was convicted of the murder in Cardiff of Lynette White. The three men originally convicted of the crime, Stephen Miller, Tony Paris and Yusef Abdullahi, had already been released but, as they told the Guardian earlier this year, had to put up with the unspoken suspicions of people who did not know them. This case led to the prosecution of 13 serving and former police officers, accused of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

In the case of Kiszko, imprisoned for the killing of Lesley Molseed, the real murderer was also found. Ronald Castree was jailed for life in 2007 but already Kiszko and his mother, who campaigned for so long for her son, were dead.

At the end of last year, Robert Napper, who murdered Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in 1992, was also jailed for life. It was a final vindication of Colin Stagg, who spent a year in prison awaiting trial for the crime and continued to suffer the taint of suspicion long after the case against him was abandoned.

Those three cases have all played an important part in reminding people that, when an innocent person is locked up, a guilty person is free to commit more crimes. While it is obviously painful for the relatives of a murder victim to be confronted with the fact that the person they thought carried out the crime is to be released, it is much worse that the real killer should remain at large.

Last month, there was a familiar scene on the steps of the royal courts of justice: a bemused prisoner emerging blinking into the daylight, a relative embracing him, photographers and reporters crowding round him. Sean Hodgson had waited a long time for this moment. He explains in a film in our new series, Justice on Trial, how his life was utterly changed by a wrongful conviction. Are there other Sean ­Hodgsons still in prison? Many lawyers and campaigners believe there are.

Since the 1980s and 90s a flow of miscarriage of justice cases has undermined public confidence in the criminal justice system. John Kamara, Paddy Hill and Sean Hodgson describe their experiences of wrongful conviction